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The Numbers: A Summary of Month 5

Month 5. It has been a REALLY busy month. Week 18 a friend came to stay with us for the weekend and we paid for most things (reflected in the eating out number for Week 18!), Week 19 saw us travel to Seoul to see family friends and do touristy things and Week 20 was Chuseok. It was a tight month (and my jacket didn’t help!) but I’m very pleasantly surprised it wasn’t tighter given how much we did. (Also, I’m trying out a new thing where I bold the week we spent the most money in each category, just to see if it highlights any more patterns in our spending): To new readers of The Brat Experiment: Husband and I track every single won that we spend on a fantastic app called Money Lover. The app is synched to both of our phones and means that it’s very easy to see where all of our money goes (which is not always pleasant!). I then report on our spending weekly and write up a summary of our spending for each month. You can check out our weekly spends and other monthly summaries in The Numbers section.

So my initial impression looking at that total was that Month 5 wasn’t too bad. Except that it was. Because we pushed ourselves to reach a 70% savings rate this month. Which meant that we merrily sent off 70% of our income as soon as we got it (yay!) and then had to survive on 1 569 072 won. Which we clearly didn’t. In fact we were 323 578 won OVER BUDGET 😦 The only reason that we survived was because we had some money left over (275 936 won) from the previous month. That left over money was what gave us the courage to try and save more in the first place but clearly it was just a little too extreme for us.

So for Month 6 we have reverted back to our usual savings rate of 66% (which means that we need to survive on 1 780 140 won). We have especially done this because we want to keep travelling like we did in Month 5. Also, with 5 months left in Korea, we are starting to think about what we want to buy before we leave. So far our list is:

2 external hard drives (we’ve decided to become a 1 laptop family so we want to have our own external hard drives)

Good quality winter clothes (reports are that clothes are very expensive in New Zealand [where we are moving after Korea] so we want to stock up here rather)

A backpacker’s guitar (travelling is part of our long-term idea for our lives, Husband loves to play guitar, and normal guitars are just too bulky to lug on our adventures)

A Korean tea set 🙂

The plan is to try and live BELOW our budget each month and then if there is any money left over at the end of the month to buy something on our wish list. It will be a push but I think that we can do it. What do you think of our plan, dear Reader?